


all in

by scarletsymphony



Series: getting ghetto married in your picturesque suburb [1]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, non-explicit mentions of blowjobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:57:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3287708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarletsymphony/pseuds/scarletsymphony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amanda loves kids. It's not hard decision, to offer to watch Liam, the first time. The pot-dealing, deodorant-stealing roommate seems in over his head, and let it not be said that Amanda isn't occasionally charitable to lost causes. The second time, she admits to herself an ulterior motive. See, she likes kids, but people her own age — not so much.</p><p>a prequel to <em>let me</em> but also reads as a standalone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all in

**Author's Note:**

> My inexplicable girl crush on Amanda is strong. Trust me, I also have no idea. This is a exercise in getting into her mindset before I try to branch out and see where her and Lip's relationship goes beyond what we've seen so far in the show. I have some vague thoughts about where it could go, but I'm more than happy to hear anyone else's ideas on the matter. As always, all criticism is welcome, and I'm still on the look out for a beta.

Amanda loves kids. It's not hard decision, to offer to watch Liam, the first time. The pot-dealing, deodorant-stealing roommate seems in over his head, and let it not be said that Amanda isn't occasionally charitable to lost causes. The second time, she admits to herself an ulterior motive. See, she likes kids, but people her own age — not so much.

But she finds herself strangely charmed by the fast-talking boy, interrupts his hilariously overprotective spiel on the care and feeding of one Liam Gallagher to tell him he's a good person. And he is. A good person, that is. And not a good person like Britanny Murphy, who in their senior year of high school posted on Facebook that instead of birthday presents she wanted charity donations, and raised over 30,000 dollars for Free The Children is a good person. He's a good person even when it's hard, when it involves running around and looking like he hasn't slept in three days. She doesn't like most people, but she finds herself drawn to him.

Now, Amanda's not exactly a bleeding heart; she can recognize that some fucked up part of her thinks the bags under Lip's eyes are hot. The real question is what, exactly, is she going to do about it. She contemplates this while helping Liam solve a puzzle, mapping out the options. She could just continue to help him out, spot him babysitting and maybe get the mess that is his school binder in order. (Seriously, her fingers itch for her highlighters and stickies every time she is forced to look at the thing.) But she thinks that maybe that's a bad idea. She's never really been good at friends, and she doesn't want to run the risk of him accidentally developing feelings for her.

Because it'd be unfair to him, in the long run. She's not convinced she can feel like that about anyone, and she doesn't want to turn into one of those rich bitches who dates Exciting and Dangerous in college, then dumps him for Marriageable after graduation. It takes a while, but eventually she comes up with a plan that allows her to hang out with him without it getting weird, and maybe even helps out with his home situation.

When she sees the opportunity to institute her plan a day later, she takes it, crawling into his bed and giving him the best blowjob she knows how. Yeah, it's kind of weird that his kid brothers are sleeping in the same room, and she's pretty sure the older one woke up and saw, which is pretty fucked up. But hey, Lip didn't exactly stop her, which she figures makes him culpable.

And this time, when he falls asleep, he doesn't look as sad and pissed off as when he came in that night and told Ron that his brothers were sleeping in their dorm room tonight. He looks vaguely alarmed, but Amanda thinks it's still probably an improvement.

After that, she can't help organizing his binder. One thing turns into another and she ends up hanging up a schedule on his wall. After all, her plan won't work out if he ends up failing out prematurely. He looks at her like she's crazy, at first, which she is, but it takes surprisingly little persuasion to get him to follow along, especially after he realizes she's scheduled breaks for blowjobs.

When he finally asks her what she thinks she's doing, she lays out the second part of her plan, telling him about her parents, their annoying if sweet misconceptions about what kind of life she's going to lead, the potential money in it for him. The expression on his face when he tells here there are worse things than parents who give a shit makes what her older sister once described as her cold, dead heart twinge a little in sympathy, but she brushes that off, embracing her role as spoiled little rich girl with vicious ruthlessness.

She doesn't know why she's so disappointed when he tells her he can't come. It makes her sharp with him, telling him she thought he was a man of his word, even though she knows it's whiny, knows he has real shit he's dealing with, that she really is being the spoiled little rich girl. More disturbing though, is the fluttering in her stomach when he walks into her statistics class and announces dinner at his place, and that she'll never say he's not a man of his word again. She got off on too many paperback harlequin romance novels in high school, she guesses.

When she arrives with her parents to dinner, she takes in the tribe of noisy kids, the way everything looks worn, dirty, or both and the honest to god DCS worker with a kind of detached delight, watching for her parents' reactions out of the corner of her eye. But a small part of herself she never shares with anyone takes it all in, looks at her parents and wonders how it all could have been different. It's a terrible, selfish, pretentious thought. She keeps it to herself.

That night, after her parents leave and she comes back, she lies next to him in his bed, staring up at the stained, splotchy ceiling, idly noting how low it slopes. She admits to herself, in the creaking quiet of the house, that she likes him. She doesn't love him, because that'd be stupid, but she does like him. Turning on her side, her eyes rest on the wad of cash Lip accepted earlier that evening to break up with her. Drifting to sleep, she decides that if she's going to do this, she's going to do it right.

So she does. She goes down on him when she wants to, makes spreadsheets of his marks, buys him expensive suits, calls him her boy toy, takes him to sorority functions and shows him off. She lets him see all her crazy, her daddy issues, is cheerfully candid about all the ugly, weird parts of herself, of this arrangement.

She figures the only way this works is if they're completely honest with each other. He still looks at her like she's crazy sometimes, and from the looks he gives her when she offers him her car for the summer, she knows there are some things she's just never going to get. It makes her feel weird, a little, but she's never been one to step down from a challenge; so when he calls her a week into summer vacation and asks to come over, she flies him in, and decides that she's going to lose his virginity to him, and it's going to be on their parents' bed.

Let no one say that Amanda does things by halves.


End file.
